The state of a hype - A survey on Radio Frequency Identification

Paper in proceeding, 2006

In resent years, the Radio Frequency Identification technology (RFID) has been introduced as the new way of product recognition and identification of goods. Several large setups utilizing RFID have been reported the media. However, very few reports have covered the actual use and thus, the real penetration and impact of the technology are so far relatively unknown. Therefore, a survey covering the interest of RFID in Swedish companies was conducted with the purpose to find out to what extent RFID is used and the future plans for implementing RFID. After identifying the most common characteristics of RFID, a questionnaire was sent to about eight hundred companies within various industries, inviting them to take part in the survey. From the about eight hundred questionnaires, 38.5 percent were collected and analysed. The results from this first analysis of the survey imply that the actual use of RFID among the participating companies is surprisingly low. Surprisingly, only a few companies stated that they currently are using RFID. One fifth of the respondents stated that they have plans for, or have made pilot studies, on RFID. On the likelihood of them implementing RFID in logistics and production, the rate was slightly higher, about one out of ten had plans for a future implementation within the production area whereas the same rate for transportation and logistics was about one out of five. There are still many reasons for companies to postpone the decision to implement RFID, especially as many of them do not see the way the technology improve customer satisfaction. The return on investment seems to be too uncertain for most companies to jump on the RFID-train.